


dress rehearsal

by newsbypostcard



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-25 08:19:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6187207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's not like Garrus didn't <em>know</em> he was attracted to Shepard before she suggested they "blow off some steam." It's more that he'd been doing a really dedicated job of ignoring it. But in the weeks since she made the first overture, he's been making excuses to see her, just to feel the thrill of attraction in his gut. It's become increasingly apparent to Garrus that he's doomed to pay attention to his interest at this point, regardless of how quickly a physical relationship is actually manifesting, but even this he plans to ignore for as long as possible. </p><p>In the interest of... you know. Respecting... authority? (Hey, whatever excuse works.)</p><p>He doesn't expect a dress to be the thing that actually undoes him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dress rehearsal

**Author's Note:**

> I've been reading a lot of memoir-type material, personal essays and such, by women who desire to be desired. I'm also still working through a lot of my own interested thoughts about how Shepard sees her own reconstruction. This was the natural result of that intersection. It combines Garrus' intensity with Shepard's peculiar relationship with her corporeal form, but it is basically about the male gaze. I would say a prevalent theme in my mass effect work is the male gaze when it comes to Shepard, but that gaze is usually meant to be admiring more than it is raw desire, while this fic is more about the latter. I am myself a little :/ :\ about it, but I'd say it fits into my ongoing project of writing het ships like the woman's pleasure is the only thing that really matters. 
> 
> All sexual references are fleeting and in the context of imagination only! Tragic, I know. Follow-up fics are planned but largely unwritten.

  


  


There’s a flaw in the calibrations. A minor problem, but definitely one that can’t wait until morning. You never know when it comes to calibrations. Best to catch these things early.

“Yeah,” comes Shepard’s voice, when Garrus knocks.

He walks in without looking up from his OSD. “Shepard, I’m a little--”

Then he does look up.

“...concerned…”

Shepard is wearing… a dress?

Later, Garrus will tell himself that it’s the armour-like component to the collar that gets him. It’s high on her throat, with a necklace cutting across her collarbone that draws attention to the graceful sinews of her neck. So it probably… _is_ armour, he decides. Just look at Miranda’s armour -- this ‘dress’ could just as easily be made out of lightweight protective polymer. 

That’s definitely what’s happening, then. She is definitely… just trying on new armour. And since that is a totally normal thing to be happening, it probably takes him a regular amount of time to close his jaw.

She glares at him out of the corner of her eye from where she’s standing in front of the mirror, stubbornly trying to coax a few stray strands of hair into her bun. “Don’t start.”

Garrus wouldn’t know how.

“I know,” she says in the face of his silence. “I’m like a dog on hind legs in this thing.”

Legs?

Garrus looks down.

_Legs._

“Uhhh, no,” Garrus says hastily. “No, I wouldn’t say that.”

Shepard makes a defeated sound and scratches nervously at the back of her neck. “Spare me the long version, Garrus. Think of my pride.”

“No.” He clears his throat and shifts nervously, because, this is fine and normal and fine. This probably isn’t an armour thing after all, but it’s still fine. “I think you, uh, look… nice.” He clears his throat again. “Good, I mean. For a human… woman. That’s a good… thing you have on. Does it have decent shielding?” 

He shuts his eyes tight and looks briefly to the floor. Yeah. It’s _calibrations_ that are the problem here.

“It’s a dress, Garrus,” she tells him. “It doesn’t have shielding.”

His delusions have failed him, but still he tries to recover. “Don’t you have a lot of enemies to wear a dress without shielding, Shepard?”

Her smile is fleeting. “I think I’ll manage.” She prods at her temple as though concerned about her skin’s elasticity -- like humans aren’t stretchy enough as it is. “I’m going to a _society party_.”

“Oh.” Garrus blinks. “Are those… uh... dangerous?”

“Not usually in the sense you’re thinking of, but this may be an exception. Don’t worry yourself. Sounds like it’ll be a room full of mass murderers, and I can still take my sidearm, so it’ll still be a Shepard party.” She turns to face him and spreads her arms out on either side of her. “Meet _Alison Gunn,_ merc leader. Do I look the part?”

She looks…

She certainly does look _something_.

“I, uh... yeah.” He clears his throat again. “You… you look great, Shepard.” He even manages to sound sincere, that time. “This mission is incognito, then.”

“Not as incognito as Kasumi can manage, but yeah, that’s the goal. Be convincing as a woman of high society. Then again, that woman of high society has to be a mass murderer to get a ticket, so maybe it won’t be as tough an acting gig as I think it will.”

Garrus has, if only in the back corner of his mind, begun seeing the humour in this. Banter. He remembers what banter is. He can totally do this. “Let’s hope so, Shepard,” he says. “If going incognito is your goal, I’m not so sure you’ve succeeded at that.”

“Right. Dog, hind legs...”

“No, I meant...” Garrus’ eyes widen as he cuts off. He clearly does not, in fact, remember what banter is, and he can tell this is about to go sideways despite his best intentions. When will he learn to keep his damn mouth shut? “I more meant that showing up looking like that means you’re gonna attract some attention. Positive attention, I mean. I guess, uh, Alison Gunn is a very attractive woman, then, based on...?” Uh oh. “Not to say that _you’re_ not a very attractive woman. I just mean that Alison… I mean, you...”

If he’d thought for a second before last month that he could’ve ever found a human this attractive, he feels like he could’ve prepared a little better for this conversation. But here he is, truthfully disarmed for one of the first times in his life and yet somehow for the second time in mere conversation with Shepard; and here she is, smirking at him, wearing a dress tight enough to raise for Garrus new questions about human physiology that have really, truly never occurred to him before.

“You know what?” he says, meekly, abandoning all attempts at grace. “Forget I said anything.” 

But he’s caught her attention now; she’s staring at him, her arms crossed over her chest. Garrus’ mind goes on some rapidfire tangent about breasts before he loudly begins mentally listing every component of his rifle instead. 

“Right,” Shepard says, nodding. “You know, that’s what every woman really longs to hear. That I look... good. Nice, for a human woman, if not as attractive as my imaginary alter-ego.”

Garrus nods shortly and accepts surrender. There’s no way to get out of this with his pride intact, so he may as well give humility a shot. “Give a poor weak-kneed man a break, Shepard,” he says. “You don’t need me to tell you how stunning you are. It’s not like I came up here expecting…” He shakes his head and holds the OSD aloft in one hand. “I came here for a reason other than to compliment you badly. Let’s just forget about it. I--”

But he cuts off when he processes the look in her eye. The smile on her face has changed form into something he’s not sure he’s ever seen from her before, and his arm falls loosely back to his side as he takes it in. 

It’s almost as though she’d been fronting her mockery of his buffoonery for the sake of withholding whatever this expression is -- only to be faced again, to be taken aback, by another one of his aborted so-called ‘compliments’. She takes in a deep breath with her hands poised on her hips, and there’s some tension thick in her shoulders, putting a curve in her back. 

“Really?” she mutters, through whatever look she’s giving him; and Garrus blinks as he waits for more, only for nothing more to follow.

“I crossed a line,” he realizes aloud. “I didn’t mean anything by it, Shepard. You should know that I... respect your authority, and that anything I say to you is liable to be insubordinate just because of the person I am. Not that that _excuses_...” He scratches at the back of his neck. “It won’t happen again. I’m sorry. I’ll just… go, now, and leave you...”

But she only shakes her head, gesturing at herself and then at him with her eyes set on the floor. Garrus stops, having turned halfway around, and moves back to face her again, then cocks his head when it’s her who clears her throat this time. 

“No,” she says. “I meant… I still managed to pull off ‘stunning’? Even under all this rigidity?” She looks at him again, and Garrus’ heart rate gets suddenly away from him from the look in her eye: bare, sincere, as disarmed as he feels. “For real?”

Her lips part, as though driven there by the force of her sincerity. Garrus clenches a fist by his side in case it might steady him enough to keep him from stepping forward.

“Well,” he begins, and swallows. “You may be asking the wrong guy on this. I happen to like rigidity in a woman. It’s a... turian thing. We all come pretty rigid, given this plating, so it makes sense that we would... be… attracted to… I mean, evolutionarily speaking...” Then he shuts his eyes again, shaking his head. If this is the only time in his life he’s going to willingly accept defeat, it’s a noble enough sacrifice of his perfect record. 

So he takes a break and starts again. “Shepard,” he says, “you’re... an exceptionally beautiful woman.” This time, when the words come to him, he doesn’t hesitate to allow himself to know them with every fibre of his being. “I mean it. By any measure -- human, turian, warrior, doesn’t matter. Hell, Shepard -- _look_ at you. Your muscles, your curves... I may not totally get the whole _eighty percent water_ thing, but any damn fool can see that you’re gorgeous.” He gestures at her, vaguely, as though to convey to her that there’s no one thing about her he doesn’t like. “And anyone who says otherwise deserves to be shot. Hell -- I’ll shoot ‘em myself. You got a list of names? I’ll get started tonight. Need something to do while you’re out anyway.”

Shepard’s smile flickers as he speaks, and at first Garrus thinks it’s mockery; but then her gaze hits the floor in the space between them instead of meeting his eye, and he realizes it’s _humility_ that’s guiding her features.

“All right,” she says, when he’s finished, without looking at him. “Thank you for that.” She touches some strand of her hair, there’s a touch of pink in her cheeks-- 

And Garrus is struck suddenly by overwhelming _want_. There is nothing he wants in the universe than to see her flush like that all over.

He shuts his eyes tight and tries to remember to breathe as heat floods his every inch. “This coming from anywhere in particular, Shepard?” he says, instead of throwing himself out the nearest airlock in search of relief.

“Uh… no.” She shakes her head and looks up at him at last, her lips pursing thinly. “No. I just… I don’t know.” She gives a breath of nervous laughter. “Especially since they rebuilt me, I’ve been feeling a little… I don’t know, mechanical. If they brought me back to be a machine, and if I feel that way, I guess I’ve assumed…” She looks to some corner of the ceiling. “Nevermind. Sometimes I just feel so focused on the mission, on being a soldier, that it’s easy to forget I used to be a woman, so thanks for -- I don’t know. Helping me remember.”

Garrus nods for slightly longer than seems natural. “No problem,” he says, and he hopes beyond hope that she doesn’t notice the strangled tone of his desire as he swallows it down.

“Anyway.” She gestures at his OSD and seems to try to find a normal way to hold her body upright. “You came here for a reason other than to have this incredibly awkward conversation. What did you want to show me?”

“Oh.” He looks at the device in his hand; he’d forgotten it was there. He steps forward and hands it to her. “It’s, uh, just the thanix cannons again. I wanted to make sure that they weren’t gonna... overheat... given the specifications we have here.” He clears his throat and tells himself to _stop thinking entirely in double-entendres, you fucking catastrophe of a turian_. “If the engines and the stealth system drives are running at the same time -- especially with the other additional upgrades we’ve put in -- the cannons create a real... risk scenario, unless we improve both our shielding, and our... cooling... systems...” 

Garrus trails off as Shepard reads over the specifications. He watches as one of her hands reaches up to tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear, then falls against the screen again as she scrolls through the information. 

_How in Palaven’s name could she for a second doubt whether she was attractive?_ he thinks to himself; and he is still watching her, doing everything he can to draw long, conscious breaths into his lungs in case it expands him enough to cool down, when she looks up at him with clear eyes.

“I don’t see a problem,” she says. Garrus almost echoes the sentiment before remembering they’re talking about the ship. “We wouldn’t be running stealth at the same time we were firing cannons.”

“You sure?” he says, then clears his throat and tries to remember she’s still in charge around here. “I don’t doubt you,” he clarifies. “I just don’t want for us to be in a situation where we try it anyway and find all our systems failing instead.”

Shepard makes a hedging noise in her throat, then slides the OSD onto the desk beside her. She looks up at him, her hands planted on her hips. “Okay. Fair enough. Run some simulations, see what we’d need to do to bring it up to scratch. Never know what info we’ll find on-mission to potentially fix the problem.”

And then she just looks at him, in no way that is different than the way she usually does, and yet Garrus suddenly feels abnormally self-conscious about what his hands are doing.

“Okay,” he says, gravel deepening in his voice. “Thanks. I’ll… keep you apprised.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

She doesn’t move, and neither does he. 

“Anything else?” she asks.

There’s an edge to her tone that Garrus might be imagining, but by the way his senses have suddenly lit up as though by impulse, it seems doubtful. 

It can be good, sometimes, to be a member of a predator species; from time to time, some instinct buried deep within him kicks in to bring everything into perfect focus when he’s least expecting it. No longer does he feel like he’s tripping over himself or trying to articulate a single idea through the brain fog of desire; instead he sees the way she’s standing in front of him with a sharpness, a comprehension, that kicks his libido into something more driven. 

Looking at her, he can see: she is somehow stripped bare at the same time that she’s poising herself as the very paragon of strength. She is challenging him, in a way, to prove her wrong, inviting him to counter her own impulses and instincts -- and there is, in the end, no mistaking this. There’s no possible way he could mistake this. He’s imagining nothing. She wants him in the same way he wants her, he’d bet his life on it.

Tact. Tact is the new predicament.

“It is a really nice dress, Shepard,” he says, to buy time.

“Yeah, well.” Her gaze drops; she reaches out, grabs at the topmost ridge of his armour. A smile flickers at the corner of her mouth, and the air changes around them into something less aggressive, more convivial, more what he’s come to expect from Shepard -- if slightly less of what he expects from a sexual proposition. “Can’t say I didn’t notice your new stripes, either. Good colour on you. Why the change?”

His mandibles tick as he makes a decision. He slides a gentle but sure hand around her waist, as though to settle a disagreement that was growing between them. It settles in her back; his fingers bend over the curve of her spine, and she curves her body into him, her smile growing slowly. “You mean apart from the gaping structural flaws in the old one?” he asks.

“Right. That.” She prods at the break in his new armour. “Seems endemic with you.”

“What can I say?” What _can_ he say? What is there to say that action doesn’t better achieve? “I have a tendency of putting myself in the line of fire.”

“Sounds dangerous.”

“Mm. I have this boss. She _insists_ on risking my life on a regular basis.”

“Listen up, Archangel. I’m not responsible for your life choices.”

It’s not lost on Garrus that he’d be beyond redemption if he doesn’t take the opportunity he’s being faced with. He runs a hand along the material of her dress -- maps the line of her hip, the way it curves, how it slopes under his palm, and imagines how he could coax a reaction from touch alone on someone with as many nerves as Shepard does. The shape of her, unobscured by the usual harsh lines of armour or the seams of a uniform, is so supple, so fluid, and the peculiar wave of desire that hits him tells him everything he needs to know about how well his efforts to control his attraction to Shepard has gone over the past few weeks.

“Turning over a new leaf.” Shepard is wearing perfume. It’s something musky and spiced, and it sets his senses afire again, the pull of arousal building in his gut. “New horizons. Call it whatever you want -- it’s really just a post-Sidonis priority check.”

She leans herself flush against him, supported against gravity by his hands at her back. There is a long silence; Garrus feels her shoulderblades shifting, moving, as she crooks her fingernails under the seams of his armour. It is as though she were contemplating taking them off of him piece by piece, and Garrus thinks -- _Unfair. **Unfair.**_

“A priority check,” she repeats.

“I, uh… Yeah.” One hand repositions at her hip again, and he scans his thumb over the planes of her stomach. She is both soft and not soft; muscles lie at her core, shifting as she bends against the jut of his breastplate. Garrus just wants to watch them move, these muscles, to watch them shift from the cleft between her legs as he figures out just how to bring her pleasure. He imagines them engaging and disengaging as he elicits each reaction from her, and the pull of her allure is so strong. He has to lean in, to lean her against the desk and bend her until--

“Hey, Commander?” 

It’s Joker’s voice, coming from the comm in the ceiling.

Shepard shuts her eyes tight and moves her face to the side. Garrus is helpless but to collapse his hands against the desk behind her, disappointment dragging harshly in his throat. His head rests against her shoulder in defeat, and her fingers set fondly against the back of his neck, a breath of laughter leaving her silently.

“Every fucking time with this guy,” she mutters. She extricating herself delicately from Garrus and pats at her own head as though to regain composure. “What is it, Joker?”

Some distant chime from EDI follows, then -- “Hang on, is there someone in there _with_ you?”

Garrus gives a tight smile and pushes off from the desk, pacing slowly up and down the corridor to try to calm himself. Shepard watches him, offers a bewildered shrug, then rubs at her forehead with an annoyed hand. “What _is it_ , Joker?” she repeats.

“Just letting you know that Kasumi’s waiting for you at the shuttle bay in Zakera Ward. You better hurry -- I saw her browsing grenade options earlier. Never know what she might do to get back at this guy.”

Shepard sighs and propels herself forward, moving quickly around her cabin to collect all that she needs. Garrus hitches a thumb over his shoulder as though to tell her he’s going, but she shakes her head concernedly, holding a finger in the air as though to ask for a minute. He blinks at her through his contemplation; but then he nods, leans against the wall, and props one foot over the other as he watches her move.

“I’m on my way,” Shepard says. It looks so easy for her to switch gears, Garrus remarks -- although, on the other hand, there is still a hint of pink left in her cheeks. “Is my cargo packed up?”

“Yeah. One hilarious statue of Saren ready to go, complete with weapons. Hey, you know what? I’ve actually changed my mind about the grenades. I hope you blow up this stupid thing before leaving the planet. It’s hideous.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Hey, is it Jacob in there with you?” Joker sounds amused. Garrus plots murder. “Maybe don’t tell Kasumi you’re involved until after the mission. Seems like she has it for him pretty bad.”

Shepard looks up sharply from her omni-tool. “Drop it, Joker.”

Joker chuckles to himself, and Garrus rolls his eyes. He’d bet good money that EDI has a better sense of ironic timing than she’s capable of conveying. “Hey, Commander,” Joker continues. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, but I saw Kasumi loading your armour into that turian monstrosity. You just gonna show up in your Cerberus uniform? Doesn’t seem very stealth.”

“Actually, I’m -- dressing up for the occasion.”

“Holy shit, really? In, like, an actual dress?” He makes an incredulous sound. “What’s that even _look like_?”

Shepard clicks her tongue. “Don’t you have anything better to do than speculate on my fashion?” she asks the ceiling. “Tell Kasumi I’m on my way.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says; then, having apparently intuited the point, he closes the channel.

Shepard shakes her head as she moves around the room, and Garrus’ mandibles click as he watches her move. She’s as swift in heels as she ever is in boots, as fluid in tight fabric as she can be under the weight of armour. He’s content just to watch her, to bask in the silence of her focus; and so he does, until she slams her pistol on the desk and props one leg up on the chair. 

She looks at him at last as she throws a holster around her thigh. There’s a glint of mischief in her eye, he can see; she is being deliberately provocative. Garrus’ mouth opens, then closes, and ultimately he just shakes his head and opts to _marvel_.

Shepard occupies two spaces at once, moving with the kind of focus that suggests that nothing at all has happened between them and openly seducing him all the while. She glances at him more than once as she sets to work installing the holster, as though ensuring that he knows she is drawing his eye to the musculature of her leg on purpose. Garrus, ultimately, takes her up on the offer -- scans the tone and structure of her form, and basks in the unnamed thrill that follows when she watches him watching her.

“Calibrations will have to wait,” she says quietly, after a few moments have passed.

Garrus nods. “Sure,” he says. He can hear the raw desire in his voice when he says it and tries to clear it out. “No rush. I, uh… I’m gonna go ahead and tell Joker not to arm everything at once until we can go over it in more detail anyway.”

She nods curtly. “Do it,” she says. Her tone is once again as he’d expect from a commanding officer, and when she looks up at him again, it’s with a fraction of a flinch on her face. The moment, it would seem, has passed them by. “Just, ah, maybe wait a couple of hours. Give Joker a chance to forget he’s accusing me of having time for an affair.”

Dread forms in his chest, then dissipates into uncertainty. “Do you… not?” he asks, before he can stop himself.

She doesn’t answer right away. When she does, it’s with a hesitant glance in his direction -- hardly anything, a fleeting thing without eye contact. “Didn’t this prove the point?” she mutters at last.

Garrus nods. “Right.”

“I, uh… I didn’t expect to…” She rubs at her forehead, her foot hitting the floor. When she turns to face him, it’s with her hands on her hips, her shoulders low on her back, her posture open and sincere. “When I suggested we _blow off steam_ , I was imagining something... different than what this became,” she explains.

“Oh.” This conversation is, if nothing else, effectively cooling him down again. “What… did you imagine?”

“Something fun. Interesting. Easy. New.”

Well, at least now he knows what he _isn’t_.

“I see,” he says.

“I didn’t expect it to be this intense.”

Garrus looks up, clinging unabashedly to the shred of hope suddenly re-ignited. “Oh?”

“You’re,” she says, but then cuts off and offers some throwaway gesture to the ceiling. “I don’t know. Attentive. I don’t know if I can reciprocate what you can offer me.”

Hope soars in his chest. “I don’t need you to reciprocate, Shepard,” he says. It comes out quickly and honestly, and by the spirits, won’t his brain keep up with his mouth for once? “Let me offer what I can. You’ve got a lot on your plate. If this interests you, that’s enough.” He shrugs, as though he possessed the slightest capability of being casual about this. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but I’m pretty interested myself.”

Shepard’s lips purse into a muted smile. “I noticed,” she says.

“Well, good,” he says, and thinks instead -- _Well, fuck._ “This -- today -- was an accident, Shepard. I didn’t expect…” He gestures at her. “Well. I didn’t expect… you. We have time.”

“We don’t have much time.”

“We have enough,” he says, and nods.

Shepard returns the nod thoughtfully, giving him a fleeting smile of thanks; but in the next second, that spark is back in her eye. 

“The dress does it for you, huh?” she asks, faux-husk flooding her tone.

“You do it for me,” he tells her with a smile. “The dress accentuates the good.”

“Hmm.” She props her leg back up against the chair and grins, and Garrus only shakes his head at her; but then she slides her pistol into its holster, slowly, the barrel of the gun running flush against her thigh, and _holy fuck._

“Unfair,” he tells her, when his mandibles have unstuck themselves.

She grins wickedly. “Just stimulating your creativity.”

“You’re stimulating something.”

She pats him fondly on the chest as she passes to grab something from the lower level of her suite. “I’m leaving now,” she tells him, eyebrows steepled high on her head. “We’ll come back to this, but in the meantime, if you don’t mind taking the next lift down...”

Garrus nods his understanding and steps aside, giving Shepard room to move past him after she’s finished running through the checklist of what she’ll need. When she finally does brush by to leave the room, it is facing him, her breasts scanning over the line of his armour, her eyes meeting his with one final burst of intensity; and her hand trails over his flank after her, as though aiming to leave some lingering trace of herself behind.

And Garrus experiences another one of those rare moments of raw clarity.

It is, at its core, a tactical maneuver. Her eyes break with his at the very last second, as though to look forward into the mission; but her fingers trail behind her, reluctant to leave him, reluctant to leave the potential of the moment they’d abandoned by the desk. Garrus reads this perfectly, his instincts sparking within him again -- and it’s nearly on autopilot when he steps after her, slips his fingers easily around her retreating wrist, and pulls her back gently toward him with a hand guiding a turn at her hip.

“Just one more thing,” he says to her as he steps himself in front of her; and she is still blinking, wide-eyed and bewildered, when he dips her into an easy bend.

She hadn’t been expecting it, and yet her hand cups his jaw so immediately that he wonders if she’d been thinking the same thing he had. Her lips are strange, warm, and supple, like the whole of her; his fingers dimple her skin under her dress as they support her weight, one hand bracing against the collar at her neck, the other returned to the small of her back. Garrus meets the challenge of kissing first with one’s lips -- finds a way to avoid snagging his mouth on her skin before he presses his tongue barely, experimentally, against her lips. 

He finds her so wonderfully responsive that he has to take a moment to breathe. They both do, holding steady in this embrace, Shepard’s muscles relaxing only slowly as her defensive instincts grind to a halt. Her hand flexes against his face, her fingers tugging at him gently enough but with clarity of message, to encouraging his mouth to move again; and so he takes her lower lip in, scans his tongue against it with the barest of pressures, and finds the kind of enticing tease that seems to resonate his intention within her: to elicit questions, more than to answer them.

When Garrus pulls back, the hand braced against Garrus’ chest has relaxed. Shepard’s fingers bend naturally against him, and she leans into his arms, trusting, easy. Garrus’ chest grows warm in that by-now familiar, swooping way as he smiles down at her, and he hopes she’ll forgive him for delaying her, but he wants to hold them here, just for another second, if they have to abandon the moment so quickly.

“Talk about unfair,” she manages eventually. There’s a note in the back of her throat that resonates in Garrus so deeply. He wants to hear more; imagines it’s only a hint of the kind of sound he might be able to bring out of her -- a whisper of potential, like the blossom of pink skin that has spread over her chest.

“You thought I was gonna let you have all the fun?” he says; and then he turns her back onto her feet as swiftly as he had coaxed her into the dip. She touches a hand to her head as she straightens, as though dizzy, and Garrus is helpless to prevent the grin that floods his features as he leans back against the wall. “Knock ‘em dead, Alison Gunn,” he tells her. Then he crosses his arms back over his chest as though there had been no interruption.

Shepard blinks hard and shakes her head at him, touching a finger to her lips. “Only too likely,” she mutters, then pats at her thigh as though to remind him that she’s armed. 

This has the intended effect, _fuck_ does it ever, and Garrus is brought to close his eyes against the memory of her sheathing the gun against her skin. “Just had to have the last word, didn’t you,” he mutters into the room.

He hears the doors hiss open, then, and he opens his eyes again to see her backing into the lift, mirroring his grin. “Always,” she tells him, fondness unmistakeable in her tone; and it’s the closing doors of the lift that break their held gaze, this time.

Then Garrus is left alone, there, in Shepard’s quarters.

He closes his eyes again and stands there for a long, long time, heat pressing hard and fierce across every plate of his skin every time he thinks of Shepard moving through some fancy party, hobnobbing with the universe’s fiercest assholes, and the pistol strapped to her thigh all the while.


End file.
